Data You Can Trust: Bayes Esports Wins Major Legal Ruling

In a major, first-of-its-kind ruling over the legality of controversial “data scraping” in esports, a Berlin court has ruled in favour of Bayes Esports in an injunction against PandaScore.

Berlin-based Bayes initially took out an injunction against PandaScore in August, 2022, arguing that data could not be advertised as “live” or “real-time” if it had been “scraped” from a public video stream, which is often delayed by minutes from the actual match.

On June 9 this year the Berlin court ruled in favour of Bayes. But PandaScore launched an appeal.

This appeal has now been rejected by the court, reaffirming Bayes legal victory over the issue and definition of “clean” data–as championed by Bayes Esports–and “scraped” or “grey” data, which has bedevilled the integrity of esports, arguably the fastest growing sports betting vertical on the planet.

The Berlin court affirmed Bayes’s contention that esports data is only “live” if it is actually obtained in real-time from the tournament organiser.

Thus, using the term “live data” for a “scraped” offer is illegal — as there is a risk that betting operators and media companies will mistakenly assume that they are actually obtaining data in real time, the Berlin court ruled.

Furthermore, the court ruled, it is also unlawful to claim that scraped data comes from the “safest source”, because from the customer’s perspective this is only the case, if: “The data is actually sourced from the tournament organiser.”

Under German law, PandaScore has the right to appeal against this latest ruling within four weeks. But, crucially, if an appeal fails or is not launched, this current ruling will be final.

Esports Milestone

The ruling marks a milestone in esports industry history because for the first time a court has legally defined how esports data offerings of different quality and origin may be marketed.

The court ruling comes at a time where the esports industry is undergoing fundamental change in going from unofficial, scraped match and odds data feeds to official data offering — moving to so-called “white” data from “grey” data.

In terms of supporting a growing industry and its players, and growing a profitable business, official, sanctioned, data offerings are a crucial part of the esports ecosystem, alongside revenues from events, sponsorships, ad revenues, licence fees and media rights.

Launched in 2019, Bayes Esports was the very first company to take official esports match data offerings to market, partnering with Riot Games for League of Legends, as well as the ESL (now ESL Faceit Group) for CS:GO and DOTA2.

Today, the Bayes team (pictured) is the market leader in esports data distribution.

And rightly so.

Bayes offers live data for over 16,000 live matches per year across its partnerships with Riot Games, ESL Faceit Group, BLAST and Krafton.

Globally, esports has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. But the vast stream of data is still fed by the unofficial grey market, with the esports community missing out on the revenue–estimated at up to €100 million a year (£86m)–generated by their own event IP rights.

“This ruling is the first step in uncovering the often illegal practices that [hitherto] have been accepted in the wider sports data industry,” a Bayes Esports spokesperson told iGamingFuture.

Piracy

“For the first time in esports history, the court ruling now makes it easier to spot unofficial data offerings.

“PandaScore has been forbidden to call its match data ‘live’.

“Public streams on Youtube and Twitch that PandaScore openly claims to scrape from have a built-in integrity delay of somewhere between 30 seconds to five-minutes.

“The only party that distributes Bayes’ partner content truly live is Bayes Esports. We get undelayed data feeds straight from the source.

“In traditional product markets, there is no question that a brand owner’s efforts must not be exploited by free-riders for their own commercial purposes.

“The digital content industry has also been successfully defending itself against the infringement of its IP for years and has been fighting piracy under civil and criminal law.

“Market participants need to understand that large scale, multi-million EUR data piracy is not a petty crime, but a serious offence with large scale damages to the esports industry.”